Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Climate Services And Transformational Adaptation, Edward Carr

Sustainability and Social Justice

The Working Group II contribution to the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report states that effective adaptation to the changing climate will require transformational changes in how people live. This article explores the potential for climate services to catalyze and foster transformational adaptation. I argue that weather and climate information are not, in and of themselves, tools for transformation. When designed and delivered without careful identification of the intended users of the service and the needs that service addresses, they can fail to catalyze change amongst the users of that information. At worst, they can reinforce the status quo and drive maladaptive …

Narrating Agricultural Resilience After Hurricane María: How Smallholder Farmers In Puerto Rico Leverage Self-Sufficiency And Collaborative Agency In A Climate-Vulnerable Food System, Abrania Marrero, Andrea Lόpez-Cepero, Ramón Borges-Méndez, Josiemer Mattei

Sustainability and Social Justice

Climate change is a threat to food system stability, with small islands particularly vulnerable to extreme weather events. In Puerto Rico, a diminished agricultural sector and resulting food import dependence have been implicated in reduced diet quality, rural impoverishment, and periodic food insecurity during natural disasters. In contrast, smallholder farmers in Puerto Rico serve as cultural emblems of self-sufficient food production, providing fresh foods to local communities in an informal economy and leveraging traditional knowledge systems to manage varying ecological and climatic constraints. The current mixed methods study sought to document this expertise and employed a questionnaire and narrative interviewing …

Development Of A Human Health-Centered Climate Resilience/Vulnerability Framework For The Mexico City Region, Alex Stever

International Development, Community and Environment (IDCE)

With climate change impacting every corner of the globe, the health and well-being of all humans is threatened, especially in heavily populated areas such as the Mexico City Region (MCR). With this threat continuously growing it is important to not only be aware of the problem and its complications but have a framework and process that will allow for rapid and well-rounded analyses of how at risk the residents of certain areas are to the threats of climate change. However, with analyzing the impacts of climate change on any sector, including human health and well-being, three conundrums arise: the socio-ecological …

Overcoming Recurring Crisis Through Resilience: An Analysis Of Usaid’S Definition Of Resilience, Leta Branham

International Development, Community and Environment (IDCE)

This paper analyzes resilience policy employed by the United States’ Agency for International Development (USAID). First, by situating USAID’s resilience policy within a historical context of the 2011 Horn of Africa Famine, and by drawing on existing literature, I show that USAID’s understanding of resilience, and thus its resilience-based policies, are inherently flawed by focusing solely on recurrent crisis. While recurrent crises pose a potential threat to resilience, communities that are exposed to chronic shocks have resilience mechanisms in place against those shocks. Rather, stochastic, or unplanned crises, are larger risks to livelihoods that USAID’s resilience policies do not address. …

Really Effective (For 15% Of The Men): Lessons In Understanding And Addressing User Needs In Climate Services From Mali, Edward Carr, Sheila Onzere

Sustainability and Social Justice

The design of effective climate services requires the identification of a problem that might be addressed through the provision of weather and climate information, and the design and delivery of actionable information to a set of appropriate users. The utility of weather and climate information for a given user is shaped not only by exposure to particular weather, climate, and market shocks and stresses, but also the sensitivity of that user’s livelihoods to particular shocks and stresses and whether or not their adaptive capacity includes the ability to use such information. Therefore, effective climate services are very place-, time-, and …

Capturing The Resilience Dividend: Post Hurricane Sandy Insights From Brooklyn's Sea Gate Community, Alexander M. Rezk

International Development, Community and Environment (IDCE)

This research project presents a resilience, governance, and vulnerability analysis of populations traditionally considered as non-vulnerable to natural disasters and climate related events. The paper examines how homeowners in Sea Gate, a neighborhood located on Coney Island, in Brooklyn, New York, experienced systemic disruption following Hurricane Sandy. This research sets out to answer the following questions: How does the lived experience of homeowners in a coastal community reflect the creation of newly vulnerable populations in regard to natural disasters in New York City? How is the current municipal resilience strategy being perceived as managing these shifts? And finally, what avenues …

A Framework For Evaluating And Enhancing Resilience Integration In Conservation Policy: The Case Of Massachusetts, Kyle Pilkington

International Development, Community and Environment (IDCE)

This paper develops a framework for evaluating conservation policy from the perspective of integrating resilience, using Massachusetts as a case study. After an intensive literature review on the topics of resilience and conservation, five resilience-enhancing attributes were identified: biodiversity, stakeholder engagement, acknowledgement of climate change, multiple species or species interaction focus and ecosystem or environment health. The framework ranks the policies with respect to the effectiveness of following the resilience-enhancing attributes. Three Massachusetts-based conservation policies, Massachusetts Endangered Species Act (MESA), State Wildlife Action Plan (SWAP) and MassWildlife Habitat Management Grant Program (MHMGP), were chosen to demonstrate the evaluative capacity of …

Atole De Maíz Azul: Building Climate-Change Resilience With Local Knowledge/Food Sovereignty In Northern New Mexico, Katherine C.R. Dixon

International Development, Community and Environment (IDCE)

The impacts of climate change in Northern New Mexico will cause a variation in seasonal precipitation and increased drought conditions. Northern New Mexico is home to numerous indigenous and rural-agricultural communities who rely on these water resources for subsistence and cultural practices. They are among the most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change.

This paper investigates the impacts of climate change to Northern New Mexico. It examines the role of participatory methods and local knowledge in building community resilience. This paper is informed primarily through secondary research, and also draws upon a series of personalized interviews from Northern New …

Natural Disasters Aren't The Problem: Poverty And Environmental Degradation In Rural Coastal Tanzania, Sarah R. Martin

International Development, Community and Environment (IDCE)

This paper examines how two theoretical frameworks, systems and resilience thinking, provide differing understandings of natural disasters, poverty and environmental degradation in rural coastal Tanzania. Both frameworks aim to expand the scope of reductionist thinking, in order to better understand the complex interrelationships between various actors, which may have not otherwise been considered. Although both theories have their individual strengths and weaknesses, neither have been able to catalyze effective solutions to these problems. As a result, I propose a hybrid version of systems and resilience thinking, as a means to best examine poverty and environmental degradation in rural coastal Tanzania. …

Rights For Resilience: Food Sovereignty, Power, And Resilience In Development Practice, Marygold Walsh-Dilley, Wendy Wolford, James Mccarthy

Geography

Even as resilience thinking becomes evermore popular as part of strategic programming among development and humanitarian organizations, uncertainty about how to define, operationalize, measure, and evaluate resilience for development goals prevails. As a result, many organizations and institutions have undertaken individual, collective, and simultaneous efforts toward clarification and definition. This has opened up a unique opportunity for a rethinking of development practices. The emergent consensus about what resilience means within development practice will have important consequences both for development practitioners and the communities inwhich they work. Incorporating resilience thinking into development practice has the potential to radically transform this arena …

Vulnerability Assessments, Identity And Spatial Scale Challenges In Disaster-Risk Reduction, Edward Carr, Daniel Abrahams, Arielle T. De La Poterie, Pablo Suarez, Bettina Koelle

Sustainability and Social Justice

Current approaches to vulnerability assessment for disaster-risk reduction (DRR) commonly apply generalised, a priori determinants of vulnerability to particular hazards in particular places. Although they may allow for policy-level legibility at high levels of spatial scale, these approaches suffer from attribution problems that become more acute as the level of analysis is localised and the population under investigation experiences greater vulnerability. In this article, we locate the source of this problem in a spatial scale mismatch between the essentialist framings of identity behind these generalised determinants of vulnerability and the intersectional, situational character of identity in the places where DRR …

Land Tenure And Disasters: Strengthening And Clarifying Land Rights In Disaster Risk Reduction And Post-Disaster Programming, Cynthia Caron, Gayatri Menon, Lauren Kuritz

Sustainability and Social Justice

USAid Brief.

Background:
Disaster-induced displacement is on the rise. The Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (Yonetani 2013; see Figure 1) estimates that in 2012 alone, 32.4 million people were displaced as a direct result of natural disasters or because they faced an acute threat of being affected by a natural disaster. These figures do not include populations affected by slower onset disasters such as drought and sea-level rise.

In addition to geophysical natural disasters such as earthquakes and tsunamis, over the last 30 years the number of climate-related disasters has increased (IPCC 2013; World Bank 2013a). Experts believe that such events …